IS THERE HOPE FOR NEW ENGLAND COD?

 

I grew up fishing for New England cod, venturing out for the first time when I was just six years old, excited by my first trip on a half-day party boat out of Provincetown, Massachusetts.  Once I could drive, and had my own car, I became a semi-regular on the party boat Super Squirrel out of Galilee, Rhode Island, sleeping in the parking lot at the town dock so that I could be one of the first aboard in the morning.

They were productive trips, with quality fish.  Throughout all of the time that I fished out of Galilee, a period that spanned the 1970s, and extended a little into the decades on either end, the pool fish—the largest fish on the boat, which won the successful angler a cash prize paid out of the pooled fund of entry fees in the daily contest—was never less than 35 pounds, and not infrequently was in the low 50s. 

Usually, I’d go home with a sack of fish—back then, maybe 40 years before anyone would hear of a Yeti cooler, the boat provided each customer with a burlap bag to hold their fish, which was tied to the rail for convenient access—but even when numbers were low, the quality was generally high.  I can still recall one October trip in ’75, when I introduced some college friends to the joys of fishing for cod; the ocean wasn’t kind, but while fishing was fishing was slow, I managed to snag a 26 and a 31, which engendered a substantial commotion when I started filleting them in a very public part of the college dorm.

The point is, although the fish were being hit very hard by foreign factory trawlers, and cod populations were in decline, the fishing was still pretty good, within just a couple hours’ ride from the dock.

I moved out of New England in ’83, ending up on New York’s Long Island.  There was winter cod fishing out of Long Island ports, but it wasn’t particularly good.  During the warm months, boats still ran out of Long Island’s East End to fish the same grounds I used to fish out of Rhode Island, but the quality of the catch was on the decline.  The best opportunities were provided by a Montauk party boat, the Viking Starship, which offered multi-day, long-range trips to the fabled grounds off New England.  Around 1990, I joined a few friends for what the boat called a “whale cod” trip to Georges Bank, a 13-hour sail from Montauk, where quality codfishing could, I was told, still be found.

The boat’s captain did all he could to put us on fish, although a hard-running tide complicated his job.  Our first drop was in 320 feet of water, on a wreck that supposedly had never been fished before; I think I could have eaten a sandwich and maybe a few fries by the time my 40 ounces of sinker—actually, two 20-ounce weights taped together—found the bottom, and I waited for my first bite.

Eventually the bite came, and over the next couple of days we all put some cod in our coolers, but neither the numbers nor the quality of fish that we had expected from a virgin wreck lying on such supposedly productive grounds.  As I carried my cooler off the boat, I couldn’t help but think that I’d carried much heavier loads, which included bigger fish, off the Super Squirrel after much shorter trips taken less than two decades before.

The moon tides and the currents they caused played a role, but it was impossible not to note that the Georges Bank  cod stock was already headed downhill.  Biologists soon determined that cod had become overfished.  

Since then, things have only gotten worse.  A research track stock assessment released last July found that all four stocks of Atlantic cod found off the United States—the Eastern Gulf of Maine, Western Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank, and Southern New England—were overfished.

The declines in cod abundance are striking.

The 2023 stock assessment noted that the Eastern Gulf of Maine spawning stock biomass declined by 97% between 1981 and 1997, although there has been “a modest increase in…spawner biomass” since then.  

In the case of the Western Gulf of Maine stock,

“Population abundance has generally declined over time, with the most recent estimates being at or near all-time lows.  The age-structure of the population is currently truncated, with age-1 and age-2 accounting for over 70% of abundance in 2021.  [internal references omitted]”

When so much of a stock is composed of such young, little fish, that stock is in serious trouble.

In the case of the Georges Bank stock,

“estimated spawning stock biomass remained high through the early 1990s before rapidly declining…Spawning stock biomass was relatively stable from the mid-1990s onward with only a small decline.”

It remains at a low level of abundance.

But the assessment’s findings for the Southern New England stock of cod, the stock that fueled my cod fishing trips out of Rhode Island, and the stock that swims off Long Island today, may be the most dismal of all.

“Estimates of stock size suggest severe depletion and high fishing mortality throughout the assessment time series…Estimates of age-1 abundance followed the general trend of stock depletion with extremely low recent recruitment.  Estimates of recent selectivity suggest that a considerable portion of the catch are juveniles.”

When the stock is already severely depleted, there are very few young fish entering the population, and a “considerable portion” of the catch are juveniles, that stock’s future is nothing if not bleak.

The question is, is there any hope that cod stocks might recover?

It may depend on where you look for your answers.

Off Newfoundland, the cod stock followed a similar trajectory to those of the stocks off the United States’ coast.  If anything, the Newfoundland cod’s decline was even worse, leading Canada to declare a harvest moratorium in 1992.  For many years after that, the population continued to languish, but it is now, slowly, beginning to increase.

Canadian biologists believe that the cod stock has, for the first time since the moratorium was established, moved out of the “critical zone” that defines a badly overfished stock, and might be able to support modest harvest.

Could the same thing happen off the New England coast?

The best answer might be a qualified “maybe.”

The first thing to remember is that New England cod are still being exploited, and have never enjoyed a harvest moratorium.  In fact, even though they have been overfished for many years, fishery managers have so far been unable to halt overfishing on the Western Gulf of Maine and the Southern New England stocks.  

Although Canadian authorities lifted the complete moratorium a while ago, and have permitted a very small commercial harvest, the fishing mortality rate on the Newfoundland cod has probably been far less than what New England cod stocks still experience.

The other very likely obstacle to a recovery of New England’s cod is a steadily warming ocean.

Cod are a cold-water fish, and in the ocean off Newfoundland, they can still enjoy low water temperatures.  But the Gulf of Maine is warming more quickly than most of the world’s salt waters, and scientists believe that warming seas have contributed to the cod stocks’ collapse.

As long ago as October 2015, an article appeared in the publication Science which tied a warming Gulf of Maine to the cod’s current troubles.  It reported that

“Cod spawning and survival have been hampered by rapid, extraordinary ocean warming in the Gulf of Maine, where sea surface temperatures rose faster than anywhere else on the planet between 2003 and 2014.”

The article described a study in which

“Using recent Gulf of Maine cod stock assessments, the researchers…tested a number of models for predicting the factors that affected cod reproduction.  Warming was the best predictor, they reported:  When summer temperatures went up, the number of fish reaching maturity went down.  ‘The number of new cod for each year that appear in the population is strongly related to temperature…And that’s ultimately what you need to rebuild a population and sustain a fishery:  new fish coming in.’”

Information coming out of Europe seems to confirm the threat that warming oceans pose to cod populations.

The sea surrounding the Faroe Islands, a Danish territory that lies about halfway between Norway and Iceland, hosts a unique stock of cod, that is reportedly “known for its large size and fleshiness.”  Twenty years ago, the Faroe Islands cod stock was so abundant that ICES, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, believed that it could support an annual harvest of 32,000 metric tons—that is, roughly 70 million pounds of cod removed from the sea each year.  But the stock has now dwindled to the point where, in 2023, ICES recommended that all harvest be suspended for two years.

Rising water temperatures are being blamed for the decline.

Cod require water cooler than 9.6 degrees Celsius (49 degrees Fahrenheit) to spawn successfully, although spawning success begins to decline somewhere below that point.  Cod stocks elsewhere in Europe, where water temperatures are warming, but remain below that critical point, are already demonstrating lower productivity.  The only two seemingly healthy cod stocks in the North Atlantic appear to be the Icelandic and Barents Sea stocks, and even the latter has been showing reduced productivity since 2013.

Petur Steingrund, head of the demersal department at the Faroe Marine Research Institute, has observed that under prevailing conditions of declining recruitment,

“You could have a big stock but only be able to preserve it if you take a small number of fish from it each year.”

It would follow that, if you have a depleted stock, you can only preserve it if you remove an even smaller number of fish—perhaps no fish at all.

Such an approach might prove successful, for it’s reported that

“after decades of practically no fishing, the Faroe Bank cod…has recently shown signs of recovery.”

Maybe “decades of practically no fishing” might be just what we need to put New England cod stocks on their own roads to recovery.

Doubtless New England fishermen, whether commercial or recreational, would strongly object, and there would certainly be complaints from the for-hire fleet.

But before they complain too loudly, such fishermen ought to ask themselves just one thing:  Would they prefer “practically no fishing” for just a few decades, if it allows someone—if not themselves, then at least their descendants—to enjoy cod once again, or would they prefer stocks to dwindle to the point that there will be not only practically no fishing, but also practically no cod, for the foreseeable future, and possibly until the end of time?

The answer to that question will tell us a lot, not only about the cod’s ultimate fate, but also about the character of those who answered the question.